The Place For My Writers Notes

Original posting Nov 9, 2010

Okay, here we are, trundling along with our tales of woe on nanowrimo, chunking along the words, getting those word counts to go up and up and up. But maybe you need some other troubles to throwing your heroes' path? What else can go wrong, right?

Well, the net is alive with the tales of stress. If you do a Google search for "life stresses," you get a pile of goodies (13 million hits? Wow! That's a lot of stress, eh?). But take a look at http://www.girl.com.au/commonstresses.htm Getting through the daily grind, including work/school stress, shopping centre stress, boyfriend stress, parent stress, sibling stress, messy room stress, fight with your best friend stress, too many things on your plate stress, I lost [blank] stress, and I just feel stressed stress! Pick a number from one to ten and let your hero have it!

Want a little more work-related stress? Hey, take a look at http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/stress.htm for general, specific, and task-related causes, plus some effects. And there's a copy of the Holmes-Rahe Social Adjustment Scale, that rates various life events for you. Pick one of those, and watch the stress rise.

Check the news, look at the latest blog fights, or whatever, there's plenty of possible sources of trouble that you can use to mix things up in your story. As I pointed out back here http://community.livejournal.com/writercises/142979.html for nanowrimo 2008, the cnn Living page almost always has some handy stuff. http://www.snopes.com/ can help you with a rumor or urban legend fit for scaring. Or maybe you'd like this? http://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm the big list of RPG plots -- ideas for you to use.

Go ahead, poke around the networks (briefly!) and pick an idea, then toss it into the wordmill and grind away. If it doesn't really work in your story, that's okay, at least you tried, and look at that -- you've got some more words down, plus you have a better idea of what you do want to write. Think about why having your hero fight off Cerberus, the three-headed dog from hell, really wasn't a good idea, and what would be appropriate? While you are there, write it down. Character notes, setting, even ideas that don't work usually provide some hints about what would work, and you don't want to lose that. So your hero would prefer to tame Cerberus? That could be an interesting scene, or set of scenes. And what happens when he brings that three-headed dog home and says, "Can I keep him?"

I suppose one of the keys here is figuring out what kind of stress you want to deal with. By and large, these lists of life stresses are likely to provide "external" stresses that aren't particularly inherent in the characters, setting, plot, etc. These can be useful for cranking up the stress level (and doesn't it seem sometimes that external stresses wait until we are on the edge before deciding to barrel into our lives? Sinks don't fail until the day when you are already stressed, and then they let go at the worst possible time. And as for computers, electronic gadgetry, etc.? It seems quite clear sometimes that they have it in for us fleshy critters, and are just watching for the day when you are really depending on them to demonstrate how spectacular a failure they can produce.). However, you may prefer to use the built-in conflicts, cranking those up. And that's fine!

Just make sure that your characters can't seem to get anything done the easy way. After all, that's what a writer is for, isn't it? To make a lot of conflict appear... complications, controversies, and other problems, all lined up as if the fates were against the heroes and their friends, or at least the antagonist and their buddies were out to get them. Sunshine and resting on a beach? Nah, not for our heroes. Hard times, typhoons, seawrecks, and other little blocks on the way to victory!

Go on, write!